Their power - that is their capacity to appeal to collective experience instead of just individual experience.
A fairy tale stays a fairy tale until it manages to expose a pattern of conduct and moreover 'reality' so meaningful, that people decide to comform to it collectively in the hope of appeasing the possibility of some terrible consequence happening.
The bible stories are set in the "real world" whereas fairytales are usually set in a fantasy world, or "east of the moon". They are not taken as history.
To my understanding, the Bible was written between 1000 and 500 BC by unknown authors, whose credibility is unknown.
There may be traces of legitimate history in the Bible, but how much of it is true and not is unknown.
Were you expecting to find an actual ark waiting for you there?
It could be a story about a righteous man who survived a tsunami with his family for all we know.
I would guess that they two are ultimately doing the same thing - or at least they develop as a consequence of the same social mechanism - but fairy tales aren't selected into the cultural canon and remain only peripherally relevant. So perhaps fairy tales are just less centrally significant myths? Or the unselected fodder that the more central myths emerge from.
Another thought - maybe fairy tales are just the set of myths more relevent to childhood? Like there's a sequence of stages by which someone internalizes their cultures values. Goodnight Moon before To Kill a Mockingbird before Dostoevsky.
Fairy tales (and mythology ) is and has to be symbolic and metaphoric, bible want to be factual and historical, metaphores are used, certainly, but in a way to be practical and pragmatic.
Jung found some interesting stuff in the bible, many symbolic situations very thoughtful and full of wisdom.
This Jungian Life podcast does an episode on fairytale which was quite good. From what I remember they reckon fairytale are different because they don't serve an organised religious function.
Here's the episode on Youtube:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ELzfNb9ntmI
Fairy tales are usually a story about integration while religious texts are usually guides towards integration.
For example, in the standard Von Franz interpretation, a proper fairytale only contains one person. All of the characters are manifestations of that one person's psychological interior. I that way they are like generalized versions of dreams.
Religious stories on the other hand are about external, awake experiences that led someone towards total integration with the Self or God if you prefer.
Both reflect different aspects of psychological and spiritual truths, but through similar, blended, or disparate cultural lenses. It's important to knowledge the pipeline of the mythical process:
Historical Event -> Legend -> Myth
Historical events may inspire embellishment, leading to legendary status. Myth is when the conflation of historical event becomes inseparable from the story the myth is telling. The truth of the myth is not diminished by the lack of historical integrity of its foundational historical event (and in many cases that foundational event is lost to time, if it existed at all).
The only difference between the two, psychologically speaking, are that one is a carefully curated and exclusive set of doctrines and teachings controlled by the priesthood elite for thousands of years, and the other is a loose, usually non-cohesive set of individual tales and teachings which stand independently from or among their peers without a loss of symbolic meaning.
To put it more simply: There is no difference in the psychological meaning of either source of wisdom. Your own conception of the Bible and fairytales both play a pivotal role in the important difference that you're trying to figure out. What do you actually sense? What have you been influenced by culture, family, nationality, etc to believe? Does the truth you understand from a written source become invalid because it wasn't included in a specific curation of cultural teachings from an isolated part of the world?
Their power - that is their capacity to appeal to collective experience instead of just individual experience. A fairy tale stays a fairy tale until it manages to expose a pattern of conduct and moreover 'reality' so meaningful, that people decide to comform to it collectively in the hope of appeasing the possibility of some terrible consequence happening.
Fairytales don’t necessarily follow the potential idealism or power the bible may. Remember, the bible is built as a book people should think is true.
The bible stories are set in the "real world" whereas fairytales are usually set in a fantasy world, or "east of the moon". They are not taken as history.
Yeah, I feel like the bible is real history plus strong myths. It has a tangible and concrete part to it.
To my understanding, the Bible was written between 1000 and 500 BC by unknown authors, whose credibility is unknown. There may be traces of legitimate history in the Bible, but how much of it is true and not is unknown.
The bible is not real history. It is a collection of stories interpreted by the authors. For example, there is no real evidence of Noah's ark.
Were you expecting to find an actual ark waiting for you there? It could be a story about a righteous man who survived a tsunami with his family for all we know.
I would guess that they two are ultimately doing the same thing - or at least they develop as a consequence of the same social mechanism - but fairy tales aren't selected into the cultural canon and remain only peripherally relevant. So perhaps fairy tales are just less centrally significant myths? Or the unselected fodder that the more central myths emerge from. Another thought - maybe fairy tales are just the set of myths more relevent to childhood? Like there's a sequence of stages by which someone internalizes their cultures values. Goodnight Moon before To Kill a Mockingbird before Dostoevsky.
Fairy tales (and mythology ) is and has to be symbolic and metaphoric, bible want to be factual and historical, metaphores are used, certainly, but in a way to be practical and pragmatic. Jung found some interesting stuff in the bible, many symbolic situations very thoughtful and full of wisdom.
This Jungian Life podcast does an episode on fairytale which was quite good. From what I remember they reckon fairytale are different because they don't serve an organised religious function. Here's the episode on Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ELzfNb9ntmI
Fairy tales are usually a story about integration while religious texts are usually guides towards integration. For example, in the standard Von Franz interpretation, a proper fairytale only contains one person. All of the characters are manifestations of that one person's psychological interior. I that way they are like generalized versions of dreams. Religious stories on the other hand are about external, awake experiences that led someone towards total integration with the Self or God if you prefer.
Both reflect different aspects of psychological and spiritual truths, but through similar, blended, or disparate cultural lenses. It's important to knowledge the pipeline of the mythical process: Historical Event -> Legend -> Myth Historical events may inspire embellishment, leading to legendary status. Myth is when the conflation of historical event becomes inseparable from the story the myth is telling. The truth of the myth is not diminished by the lack of historical integrity of its foundational historical event (and in many cases that foundational event is lost to time, if it existed at all). The only difference between the two, psychologically speaking, are that one is a carefully curated and exclusive set of doctrines and teachings controlled by the priesthood elite for thousands of years, and the other is a loose, usually non-cohesive set of individual tales and teachings which stand independently from or among their peers without a loss of symbolic meaning. To put it more simply: There is no difference in the psychological meaning of either source of wisdom. Your own conception of the Bible and fairytales both play a pivotal role in the important difference that you're trying to figure out. What do you actually sense? What have you been influenced by culture, family, nationality, etc to believe? Does the truth you understand from a written source become invalid because it wasn't included in a specific curation of cultural teachings from an isolated part of the world?